An hour ago, Colt leaned over the side of a Zodiac boat in Icy Bay, Alaska, and lowered a Niskin bottle into glacial water.
“The things we’re going to look for are salinity, clarity, temperature and depth,” he told me as he collected a sample. “We will also look at the levels of chlorophyll and plankton.”
Before we go back to our main entrance expedition shiphe also helped conduct a Secchi disk test, tow some plankton nets, and bring aboard chunks of floating ice for the ship’s science team to examine—all part of collecting data for a citizen science project for NOAA.
Colt is my 14 year old son. For our family, this is the last destination in about six years of traveling around the world. It’s school for him too.
In 2020, our family began balancing school and travel – and Colt has kept this arrangement going
My family has traveled the world for years, to places like Chichén Itzá in Mexico. Phil Lockwood
In early 2020, all three of my children were attending school remotely, as was virtually every American child.
But sometime in that first year of it online learningmy wife and I realized that if school was going to be experienced on a laptop, the laptops might as well travel.
So we started choosing destinations that could be included in the curriculum. We explored the ruins of Chichén Itzá instead of reading a chapter about it Mayan history. Jungle and nature tours replaced biology worksheets. Instead of opening textbooks, we booked museum and architecture tours around the world.
That emergency solution became a lifestyle: roughly speaking six years of constant travel through more than 30 countries on all seven continents.
When classrooms reopened in the fall of 2021, our children had to decide whether to continue traveling or go home. Our eldest daughter went back to personal learning. Our middle daughter followed in 2025.
Colt looked at the same options – a good school four blocks from our house in Denver, the same school his sisters chose, or his passport – and chose the latter. He has chosen it every semester since.
His education became a mix of “world education” on the way through travel and formal online education.
The online half has not always been a hit. We went through two state-sanctioned schools before landing on a private academy with a fully accredited K-12 program that felt like a good fit. This accreditation is important to us because it helps to retain everyone door to higher education Open.
It has almost the same curriculum as a brick-and-mortar school – math, literature, even science experiments – minus the standardized state exams.
The real difference is when the work happens, not or it does. Assignment deadlines are flexible, and as long as everything is completed within the semester, credit is credit.
So Colt works ahead when he knows we’re going to lose connectivity – which is exactly how these 10am Zodiacs don’t cost him a grade.
The one thing the virtual academy can’t offer is gym, and between his trick scooter crew, hikes and swim days, Colt covers that with about six hours of activity a day.
Traveling the world has taught him things that a classroom could not
During our travels, Colt has learned how to be a leader and improviser. Phil Lockwood
At 11, Colt was our family’s designated airport navigator. We would land on Changi from Singapore or Narita from Tokyo with a close connection, and he asked us to lead us from gate to gate – usually across several halls.
That same year, he started his own YouTube channel, created his own episodes and arranged his own collaborations. He earned almost 5,000 subscribers in his first three months.
When his eldest sister came to visit the Philippines for the first time, it was Colt who gave her and her boyfriend a full city tour of his favorite spots.
Last winter in Hong Kong he wanted a silver chain. He researched the best open-air markets, mapped out his route and negotiated with vendors until he got his price.
He’s also the kid who will try any street food put in front of him: day-old chicks in Manila, horse sashimi in Kyoto, fried scorpions in Bangkok.
Here’s the part that surprises people the most: the trip didn’t make him fleeting. It made him an operator.
Six years of navigating unfamiliar places has convinced him that he can just… figure things out. He does that too, both in his own country and abroad.
Although we travel regularly, we are not abroad all the time. Since settling back in Denver in 2025, our trips have dropped from two weeks to about once every two months, with regular life in between.
And in normal life his operator side really comes to the fore.
Colt runs a small reptile farm from his bedroom: five terrariums of geckos with automated heating, misting and incubation systems that keep everything alive while we’re on the road.
My son runs an entire business from his room. Phil Lockwood
But the geckos are just inventory; the business is service.
He finds neighborhood children who want one, creates a care plan, shops for supplies with their parents, sets up the living environment, trains the family, and then checks in months later. He also pets geckos for his customers (his word, not mine).
When his breeding pair surpassed his customer list, he called the local reptile stores until they agreed to buy his young.
And when he’s not moving geckos, he’s selling crafts and knocking on doors, offering to do odd jobs for neighbors to finance new scooter parts.
Last fall, he added Little Guy Lawncare to the portfolio, a neighborhood leaf removal service complete with printed business cards. He launched it with a $150 loan from us, which he paid off in the first week.
No one assigned all of this.
I’m not sure what my son’s future holds, but I have faith that he will get to where he wants to be
In Denver, my son runs several businesses on his own. Phil Lockwood
Global education comes in many forms. It is not suitable for every family, and there may be real costs involved; I won’t pretend otherwise.
In Colt’s case, the biggest disadvantage is that we don’t encounter many children his age during our travels, because we often travel while most of them are in school. That’s no problem on a hike or a swim, but on days at sea and long travel days, Colt gets bored and misses his geckos and his friends from Denver.
Yet the school four blocks away is there every semester. Every semester he weighs his options and chooses this life instead.
Since skipping a grade, Colt is on track to graduate from high school at the age of 16. traditional American university. He’s already eyeing an internship at the late Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo, and his endgame is one reptile rescue and breeding center of his own.
All three of our children are intelligent, kind and talented. His sisters thrive on more traditional paths, and I have no doubts about their future. Colt is just wired differently. Years of global education did that, and somewhere along the way it also changed my definition of “prepared.”
I can’t tell you what country my son will be in at the age of 22, but I know he will have ended up there – from gate to gate, on his own route – and he will be absolutely fine.
